


Globes and Maps

by cleo (miri_cleo)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Community: smut_fest, F/F, Femslash, Future Fic, Knifeplay, Original Character(s), Original Female Character(s) - Freeform, Post-Apocalypse, Smut, Steampunk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-30
Updated: 2012-09-30
Packaged: 2017-11-15 09:28:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/525790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miri_cleo/pseuds/cleo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ada has her clockwork, but is it really enough?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Globes and Maps

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the smut_fest prompt "Clockmaking is a lost art in the 22nd century, but this aspiring clockmaker has discovered a broken time machine made of clockwork. Can they repair it? Where do they want to go and where does it take them?"

The screech of grinding gears and ticking of clocks had no place in such a streamlined world. They were unholy, some said—unholy and a remnant of a time made more distant than it was by a mass forgetting after some spark or another turned the tide of invention, leaving a graveyard of rusted cogs and copper wiring in its wake. But such curiosities—as they inevitably had become—were what people sometimes sought.

Ada had learned to put together a pocketwatch when she was a child. It was her father's and his before him. And before that, who knew. There was no grand romanticism of clockwork running in the family, no tradition struggling through one last line. Ada's father was a professor of neurogenetics. His father had been a mechanic, one of the last human ones, in an autoconstruct factory. It was a great triumph that her father made so much of himself. And it was a great failure when his only child, born with her grandfather's gift with mechanical puzzles, became a permanent student of history, a reconstructor.

She could imagine a time when her tiny loft above the University Museum of Reconstructed History might have been flooded with lazy, late afternoon sunlight, fading the hardwood floor. The building was old, one of the oldest still standing, but there was little use for it. The floors she imagined had long rotted away, and the ones her feet touched were indestructible and not wood at all.

As for the afternoon sunlight, there was little variation in what filtered through the dome that surrounded the University. And the elevated roadways and terraces that surrounded it blocked her view of the sky. Ada blinked and the clear, magnifying lid slid over her right eye. She couldn't say how she made it happen, but her body responded to some complex communication with her mind to make the modification work as it was supposed to. Her father would have known. He might have even invented the technique for all Ada knew. 

But she doubted it. The mod was not obvious, but it was useful for reading old texts, for doing some of the work of the museum. It was necessary to her profession. It helped her see the tiniest of wires and gears and whatnot as she carefully worked to piece them together. 

Most pieces were not whole. Some, Ada could supplement with things of her own making, or bits and pieces from other broken artifacts. It was difficult; there were very few complete texts. There was little to make sense of the clockwork constructs that had come before the sleek, electric world Ada had been born into. 

Clockwork was a curiosity. She made wooden clocks for the rich to display in their homes. She made wristwatches as a kind of nostalgic fashion. She made little toys too delicate to be played with, and she was paid well for it. But her corner of study was only half taken seriously. There were no scholarships. There was no full funding. 

Ada sighed as she stilled her hands, blinking the magnifier away. She looked at the work in front of her, the beautifully preserved wooden box full of intricate gears, with its cracked dials that she would probably never be able to replace. It was the most complicated artifact that she had ever worked to reconstruct, and she had absolutely no idea what it really was. 

But it pulled at her attention the way clockwork always had, and even more than that. It had begun to consume her months before. It had ruined things with Clarissa. Ada ran her fingers through her messy hair as she remembered the last time they were together. 

_"It's ironic, you know."_

_"Mm," Ada intoned, not really listening as she bent closer to the gears of the contraption._

_"Without that…infernal contraption, I might have come back here again." Clarissa was on her in a moment, straddling Ada's thighs and obscuring her work area. Speed was one of her mods, as were strength and agility. She was naked, her beautifully brown skin covered in a sheen of sweat. "And without me, you wouldn't be able to give all of your attention to that thing."_

_"Don't be cruel, Riz." But it was true. Clarissa had brought her so many of the parts for this and other clockwork machines. She would be gone for weeks, months, before turning up with a sack of cogs and gears or a box of broken, half rusted clockwork toys or something of the like. Each time she would drop her prizes on Ada's worktable, smirking like a cat._

_"Cruel?" Riz leaned back as she arched one of her eyebrows. They were plucked severely thin in contrast with Riz's wide face. She had strong arms and legs, thick with sinewy muscles. Ada loved to watch her move, to see the ripples of the muscles working together, like an organic machine, infinitely complex. "You don't know cruel."_

It was true; Ada had never been outside of the Bubble. She rarely went outside of the University dome. But no one was supposed to be able to go outside, and the channels the smugglers used were a mystery. Blinking the magnifier in place again, she focused on the winding mechanism of the box. Outside, they had been taught, there was nothing left. 

Everyone knew that wasn't true, but it was of little concern. The long trains between Bubbles, the life sustaining, controlled domes, were underground and quick—no need to think about outside. There were ruins enough in the bubbles, enough things to reconstruct. But the the carefully polished components, large in front of Ada's augmented eye, came from that wasteland. 

"You've never really felt the way the sun threatens to make your blood boil, girl," Riz had told her more than once. "They say nothing can live out there, but they don't know." Riz claimed there were things that survived—ruined, half things. But she wouldn't say much more. "You're so comfortable here. Too comfortable building your history and your ticking tocks, and your wind up fucking machines." Riz would leer, but that would make Ada catch her breath. "But you'll always hide in your bubbles wondering what happened out there. Trying to make it all over again." Riz scoffed. "I know better."

Maybe she did. But to Riz, the bits of metal she collected were nothing more than the money they made her. And the money was worth the risk. But there had to be secrets out there. Ada sighed; Riz was right. She was comfortable there, and braving the outside was an impossibility.

"What are your secrets," she murmured to the box as she tinkered carefully. After a while, Ada pulled away again. "I'll probably never know."

She stood, scraping the legs of her chair against the floor. It was a hollow sound. Nothing of Riz remained in the room. Her stained duffel bag was gone, her boots and dirty clothing. But it was like that every time she left. Only this time, Ada knew, she really wasn't coming back. Ada had never given so much time to such a project, a mystery device, and though she would never admit it, it frightened Riz away. 

Ada looked to waiting projects. There was always something to do, and she had commissions waiting. Just as she was about to make herself sort through it all, something in the air seemed to snap. Ada took a sharp breath, and it felt like it hung in the air before entering her lungs. She heard the faint sounds of turning clockwork coming from the box. But she felt frozen, somehow out of synch with the moment. 

It seemed like she waited a long time, only listening, as nothing happened. But Ada noticed the light, how it began to brighten as if it were morning. Her jaw hung open. It couldn't be possible. 

But it seemed to be moving more quickly. Ada, still somehow outside of it, realized she was watching herself. She didn't know how long she had been fixated on her own back, hunched in the chair over the machine that was both somehow working and taken apart. It was mesmerizing, and Ada found it so difficult to focus on the machine itself. The dials; she couldn't tell if the dials were working or not. 

But she heard the door open, snapping her attention to it instantly. Riz's back approached her, and Ada gaped as she watched Riz stepping out of her boots and her faded green trousers. She did not need to look at herself to know that her cheeks had been red, her eyes puffy with dried tears. Time was moving backwards. She was naked in that chair, and Riz was undressing in a peculiar, backwards way with slow, sightless steps to the worktable. 

Ada was already wet when she saw the once clean hunting knife in Riz's hand come away from a cloth wet at the edge with her own blood. Riz mouth moved, but the sounds were incomprehensible. And still Ada knew what she was saying. 

"There's none of your globes and maps that can lead you to what you want, Ada."

But Riz wasn't leaving this time. She was saying it backwards; she was coming back to Ada. Ada watched Riz straddle her as if she were a third person. It was strange and strangely exhilarating. 

The machine continued to click, speeding slightly.

Riz pushed herself down on the strap on Ada was wearing. She hadn't remembered putting it on earlier that night, but that's how nights were with Riz. As she watched herself and Riz, she pressed her legs together and shuddered. It was incredible. What she had discovered was incredible. And Riz was coming, head thrown back as she pulled her orgasm back within herself and straightened, holding it all in again.

With strange movements, Ada saw herself thrusting her hips into Riz. And Riz was still, sweat on her brow. She never knew that she looked at Riz with such intensity. There was a stillness about them, and the trickle of blood that came from her own breast flowed back into her body while Riz seemingly sealed the skin with the tip of her knife. She watched herself pull back in her own moan as Riz pulled the knife back to her and twirled it in her hands. 

Before Clarissa, Riz had never experienced such yearning, such frenzied, frightening passion. She had been too afraid of her own desires to even fully know them. But the first time Riz had brought out her knife, Ada had trembled with more emotions than she could take. Yet, she had been rapt while Riz carefully explained to her what she would do and how Ada could stop it with a mere word. Ada had used her word at the first touch of the cold blade to her skin, but that had been a long time ago.

This was the ritual, and Ada watched it play in front of her in reverse, her own blood being pulled from Riz's fingertips, back into her skin. And with each time, her own need for release in that place unstuck in time grew. Riz was slick against the cock Ada wore, and in the blur without time, Ada wished she could smell her. She wished she could taste her again. Where she was clean shaven, Riz’s pussy was covered in stiff, course curls that Ada loved to push apart before licking the length of Riz's slit. 

She knew she could never have that again, and yet, she knew she was having it all again then. One of Riz's breasts was in her mouth just then, as she watched, and she knew the sounds she was making against Riz's nipple were wordless pleas. 

Riz had left that night before Ada could come. She left Ada with nothing but tears and need, but Ada's shallow cuts were dry before the door closed, and she couldn't will her hands to touch herself—loyal to Riz's unspoken commands to the end. 

Soon Ada would be back at her work, if time kept progressing backwards. And after that, she would be in bed with Riz's taste on her lips, almost asleep between Riz's legs. But time began to fly backwards more quickly. Ada caught her breath as the room blurred. 

Time wound backwards, becoming more finite, and she could only watch. She was still wet, still wanting, her chest heaving. She had not realized that she had begun to touch herself over her clothing. And as she reached her climax, she realized with this device, she needn't continue to remake history. She could make it, shape it; she could know it intimately.

But the device spun and clicked on, and as the haze of her orgasm faded, Ada knew she had no way to stop it.


End file.
